Do Educated People Believe in God More or Less?
(ANALYSIS) Here’s a lesson that I’ve learned over the last couple of years: If the first book you write gets any traction at all, you will be remembered for that work for years to come. Not that it’s a bad thing. I am still giving presentations to different groups that use graphs that I first put together over five years ago.
People want to read “The Nones” and talk about it. That’s truly a blessing. I think I speak for most academics when I say that I’m just glad that anyone wants to read what we spend years writing.
The second chapter of that book is the one that I’m the proudest of when looking back. I try to answer a seemingly simple question: What caused the nones to rise? It’s obviously not a simple question to answer. There are dozens of reasons. But the first one I point to is probably the most foundational: secularization theory. In short, it’s this simple idea:
As a country becomes more educationally advanced and economically prosperous, it will become less religious.
I am most certainly not going to take readers down a very dry and boring academic explication of the architects and nuances of secularization theory. All I’m going to say is this: Western Europe is a pretty strong case study of secularization theory.
I’ve written a lot about the impact that education has on religiosity in a bunch of different pieces. When it comes to religious attendance in the United States, there’s basically no empirical evidence to point to the fact that education makes one less likely to attend. If anything, there’s a decent case to be made for the opposite: Educated people are the most likely to report weekly religious attendance.
But that is, of course, only one facet of religiosity. One I haven’t really touched on a whole lot yet is religious belief. It’s probably the hardest one to poll on in surveys because it’s such an amorphous concept. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the minutiae of that methodology discussion, so let’s just cut to the chase. I am going to use the General Social Survey’s question about belief in God. They first asked about it in 1988, but only included in every survey since 2006. Here’s how it’s setup.
Please look at this card and tell me which statement comes closest to expressing what you believe about God.
1. I don’t believe in God
2. I don’t know if God exist and I don’t believe there is any way to find out
3. I don’t believe in a personal God but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind
4. I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others
5. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God
6. I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it.
Here’s how responses to those questions have changed since 1988.
This graph isn’t great, to be honest. This is a big problem in data visualization: one response option is clearly much more popular than the other ones. It throws off the scale for all the others. But you can get the gist here:
The certain belief in God number was incredibly high in 1988 — over 60%. It’s clearly declined a bunch since 2000. Now it’s about 50%. The other lines don’t look like they are moving up or down too dramatically.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.